Lands!

Gavin VerheyTuesday, June 26, 2012

All eyes are turning to Legacy as Grand Prix Atlanta approaches this weekend. Players are busy looking for a deck to play, and with Land Tax unbanned, who knows what kind of splashy new decks might show up! One place to look for decklists is always the StarCityGames.com Open Series, and last week's stop in Detroit didn't disappoint. Bobby Kovacs brought his land-centric deck to the event—and took down the tournament!

The Lands deck is aptly named—this deck features a ton of lands! With more than thirty-five powerhouse lands in the deck and both Exploration and Manabond to accelerate you past the normal one-land-per-turn restriction, this deck builds up its real estate in short order. And its lands aren't just run-of-the-mill basic and dual lands either—specialty lands like The Tabernacle at Pendrell Vale, Maze of Ith, and Rishadan Port control the game despite "merely" being lands.

The Lands deck hasn't appeared at the top of a Legacy Open for a while—but Bobby's take has a few differences from the norm. Raven's Crime is the big card here, fighting off control and combo. Normally, combo decks are rough matchups for Lands because the deck doesn't have a good way to interact with combo—but with Raven's Crime, Lands can strip away the combo deck's hand and make it difficult to kill you in time.